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Sunday, July 31, 2011

Addition information has developed after a religious leader in the state of North Carolina shot to death his four-​year old step son because he thought the boy, Jadon Higganbothan, might be gay. The man, Peter Lucas Moses, 27, who also shot to death a 28-​year old woman, may face the death penalty.

Prosecutors laid out the case Friday against the Durham man who forced his children and followers to call him "Lord" and feared him. Peter Lucas Moses faces first-degree murder charges in the deaths of Jadon Higganbothan, 4, and Antoinetta Yvonne McKoy, 28.

Prosecutors said they will seek the death penalty against him. Defense attorneys didn't speak in his behalf at a court hearing Friday. Prosecutors said Moses killed Jadon because he thought the child was gay and McKoy after he learned she couldn't have children and wanted to leave the group.

Jadon's death

Jadon's interaction with one of those children, prosecutors contended in court Friday, led to his death.

Sometime in October 2010, prosecutors told the judge, one of the women told the defendant that Jadon had hit another child's bottom, and Moses retaliated because he thought the boy might be homosexual - partially because the child's father had left his mother.

Homosexuality, Cline contended, is frowned upon by the Black Hebrews, so the defendant asked the boy's mother to get rid of him.

Moses then ordered two of the other women to set up computers and speakers in the garage, prosecutors contend, then the defendant took the boy into the garage, where music and the Lord's Prayer in Hebrew blared, and a gunshot sounded. One of the women told investigators the boy was shot in the head.

Some of the women cleaned up his bloodied body, prosecutors said, then put it in a suitcase in the master bedroom until Moses complained about the smell.

McKoy's death

Though prosecutors are not sure of the date when the violence occurred, they argue that McKoy, a woman who knew Moses in high school, was killed weeks, maybe even months after the boy.

McKoy, who kept a diary, found out she could not have children and wrote in several entries that she worried that "Lord" might kill her, according to prosecutors.

McKoy tried to escape the house right before her death, according to a neighbor whom investigators interviewed.

On one day in late December, she ran to the neighbor's house and asked to use a cell phone to call her mother in Washington.

The neighbor thought the woman was mentally troubled and had run away from a group home, and did not call police.

The other women came out of the house where McKoy had been living and wrestled her to the ground, then dragged her back inside, the neighbor told investigators.

The defendant then beat McKoy repeatedly that day and tried to strangle her with an extension cord. McKoy, according to the informant, begged for her life.

The defendant then got the gun that had been used to kill Jadon, the informant told investigators, took it to the bathroom, and then one of the women shot her while playing the same music that had blared from the garage when the boy was shot.

McKoy's body was kept in a large trash bin inside the house, according to prosecutors, before it was buried in a shallow grave alongside the boy's, at an Ashe Street house where Moses' parents lived for a time.

Investigators discovered the remains in June, months after their investigation began as a missing person case.

--> Posted by a volunteer Community Blogger of Kentucky Equality Federation. This is the official blog of Kentucky Equality Federation. Posts contained in this blog may not be the official position of Kentucky Equality Federation, its volunteer officers, directors, management, supported organizations, allies or coalitions, but rather the personal opinions or views of the volunteer Community Bloggers. The opinions or views expressed in the blog are protected by Section 1 of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Kentucky as non-slanderous free speech; blogs are personal views or opinions and not journalistic news sites.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs report says violent crimes against people in the LGBT community rose 13% in 2010, and that minorities and transgender women were more likely to be targeted. (Kentucky Equality Federation Outreach Directors)

In March 2011 in Northern Kentucky:

Hate crimes are nothing new to Northern Kentucky; indeed, Kentucky Equality Federation has intervened and acted as public advocate in 6 such cases. In Covington, the Commonwealth's 3rd largest city, at the request of the Commonwealth's Attorney, a Kentucky Circuit Judge ruled that a white supremacist had committed a hate crime when he attacked four people last year outside a bar frequented by gay people. Under Kentucky law, sexual orientation and gender identity can be classified as hate crimes by the Commonwealth's Attorney with the final decision residing with the presiding Judge.

An 18-year-old gay man from Texas allegedly slain by a classmate who feared a sexual advance. A 31-year-old transgender woman from Pennsylvania found dead with a pillowcase around her head. A 24-year-old lesbian from Florida purportedly killed by her girlfriend's father, who disapproved of the relationship.

The homicides are a sampling of 2010 crimes against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people compiled by a national coalition of anti-hate organizations.

The report, released Tuesday, showed a 13% increase over 2009 in violent crimes committed against people because of their perceived or actual sexual orientation, gender identity or status as HIV positive, according to the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs.

Last year's homicide count reached 27, up from 22 in 2009, and was the second-highest total since the coalition began tracking such crimes in 1996. Of those killed, 70% were minorities and 44% were transgender women.

The data are compiled by the coalition's 43 participating organizations and are not comprehensive. They include crimes reported to the groups by victims who did not seek help from law enforcement. In fact, 50% of the 2010 assault survivors did not make police reports, with minorities and transgender people the least likely to come forward, the report said.

Among the cases was an April 2010 attack on Cal State Long Beach transgender student Colle Carpenter, who was cornered in a campus restroom by an assailant who carved "It" on his chest. Jake Finney, project manager with the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, said campus police initially "were not clear that the word 'It' was a slur and indicated anti-transgender bias." The center contacted the FBI, which assisted in the investigation, and the crime was ultimately classified as hate-motivated, Finney said.

The 2010 murder count is second to the 29 logged in 1999 and 2008. Among the 2008 fatalities was gay Oxnard junior high school student Larry King. The classmate charged in that killing, Brandon McInerney, is on trial.

Coalition members said hate crimes tended to increase after other high-profile attacks and when civil rights advances for the LGBT community were publicly debated.

"As we move forward toward full equality, we also have to be responsive and concerned with violence that may run alongside of it," spokeswoman Roberta Sklar said. "We don't want to go back into the closet to avoid it."

--> Posted by a volunteer Community Blogger of Kentucky Equality Federation. This is the official blog of Kentucky Equality Federation. Posts contained in this blog may not be the official position of Kentucky Equality Federation, its volunteer officers, directors, management, supported organizations, allies or coalitions, but rather the personal opinions or views of the volunteer Community Bloggers. The opinions or views expressed in the blog are protected by Section 1 of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Kentucky as non-slanderous free speech; blogs are personal views or opinions and not journalistic news sites.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

What does the historic vote on same-sex marriage in New York mean for the rest of the country? Will it play a role if and when the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the California case? Will it propel or impede efforts in other states to legalize gay marriage?

Vows will be said in New York long before those questions find answers, but what can be said for sure is that the New York legislation will nationalize the gay marriage debate in a way that no other step in the long campaign has.

No matter that New York is the largest state in the U.S. to hold that the union of a man and a man or a woman and a woman is equal to that of a man and a woman. California, the largest state in the U.S., held that distinction for a few months, until electoral and judicial jiujitsu tied same-sex marriage up in knots there. (story)

"The New York vote marks a particular and important shift in the political landscape around same-sex marriage," adds Professor Marc Spindelman of the Ohio State University law school, who has followed gay marriage's serpentine legal path for years.

And Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., told TIME that New York's impact on the rest of the country can't be overstated. "The New York vote is massively important — perhaps even pivotal," he said. "This is due, not only to the size of the state's population, but to the political process by which the Governor and leading Republicans pushed this through the New York Senate. We should expect these same tactics to appear elsewhere."

In one sense, the most immediate impact of the New York legislation, beyond the obvious fact that more gays will now marry, is the way the 10 days of political wrangling in Albany came to a head over nearly intractable issues of religious liberty. While Chemerinsky told TIME that the furor was in some ways overblown — "No religion has to marry anyone it does not want to marry. I think that this was a misleading argument," he says — other scholars who have followed the debate for years say there's no denying that expanding gay rights so quickly has created real tensions between laws protecting the freedom of conscience and the newer protections for gays and lesbians.

Gay marriage isn't the first issue to do so, but it's likely to be the most fought over. No one is arguing that the Catholic Church, or any church, must marry a gay couple — and the protections written into law in New York saying so were probably redundant. But the New York law went further than merely restating the constitutionally obvious. It also wrote into law the right for all religious institutions — hospitals, adoption services — and so-called benevolent organizations to refuse to not just marry gay couples but the right to refuse accommodating their weddings, too. For gay couples in New York, good luck finding a Knight of Columbus hall to rent, for instance.

Some saw the religious-based objections to gay marriage as mere pretext for deeper, and harder to express public antipathy towards homosexuality. And others, like Mohler, see the provisions as mere fig leaves for defecting conservatives who wanted cover for their votes n favor of marriage. But whatever their political uses, the religious protections point to one aspect of the New York vote that will resonate throughout the country as the issue advances elsewhere.

"There is certainly a religious liberty issue," Andrew Koppelman, the John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University, told TIME after the New York vote. And it's not just a question for the prelates of the world who might bristle at the idea of the state ordering up gay marriage, a prospect that sent Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York City into rhetorical overdrive in the days leading up to the vote. Individuals who deeply oppose gay marriage could find themselves pushed to participate in ways big and small — and for that reason the protections in the New York law could become important.

"The 'guy who runs the tuxedo shop' is trying to live his life in accordance with his most deeply held ideals, which is just what gay couples are trying to do," Koppleman says. "The fairly mild religious accommodations in New York law will somewhat ease conflicts of that sort, in a way that is unlikely to significantly injure any gay people."

Mohler worries that the New York law's religious liberty protections will almost certainly be challenged by gay couples who see a tuxedo shop's owners refusal to do business with them as deeply insulting. "These issues are inevitable, given the complicated and inevitable interface of religious conviction and the institution of marriage. It is hard to see how the accommodation put together in the New York legislation can stand, given the direction of the courts."

New York Law School professor Arthur Leonard, who has edited the widely cited "Lesbian/Gay Law Notes" for 31 years, is more hopeful than Mohler. But he, too, agrees that the provisions in the New York law run the risk of setting up a collision course in the courts. "You need to understand the history on this. There have been disputes, mainly about Catholic adoption agencies refusing to provide adoption services for same-sex couples, and a few other disputes around the country, that provide the fuel for these demands for religious protections," he told TIME.

"The language is ambiguous enough to mean that it may take a court to determine when the religious liberty interests prevail against the right of gay couples to arrange their weddings," says Leonard. But he said the bill contains a "poison pill provision" that means if the religious liberties clauses are struck, the bill itself is invalidated. "So the bill potentially gives a wide range of religiously-affiliated entities license to discriminate against married same-sex couples. I am hopeful that administrators at Catholic hospitals, for example, will be wise enough and compassionate enough avoid the temptation to discriminate against same-sex spouses of patients, which would preclude the need to litigate the matter."

.....

Kommers says he still favors finding a way out of the inevitable clashes of conscience that he says legalizing gay marriage will bring about. He would reserve marriage for opposite-sex couples but would create civil partnerships to allow all sorts of couples, including gay couples but also unmarried siblings or aging friends, to arrange their lives as they see fit and for those unions to be given the same legal benefits as married couples.

But for now, momentum is in the other direction. "The New York vote reframes legislative debates on lesbian and gay rights across the country, including in states that have yet to provide even the most minimal sort of anti-discrimination protections for lesbians and gay men and their families," Spindelman told TIME. "Legislative reluctance to enact basic civil rights protections that others can take for granted — or do not need — looks increasingly ideological and out of date, a throwback to another era. The New York vote is a bright arrow pointed toward the future — a future that many welcome, but that others, of course, continue to perceive with something more akin to dread."

Count Mohler in the latter group. For him, the country has been down this divisive path before — and it's nothing to look forward to. "It now appears that the nation is moving in the direction of a divided map on the issue of marriage," he told TIME. "I predict that this map might look much like the map of the U.S. on legalized abortion prior to Roe v. Wade." If he is right, then we may be fighting over gay marriage 40 years from now, no matter how the Supreme Court rules should it ever hear the California case.

--> Posted by a volunteer Community Blogger of Kentucky Equality Federation. This is the official blog of Kentucky Equality Federation. Posts contained in this blog may not be the official position of Kentucky Equality Federation, its volunteer officers, directors, management, supported organizations, allies or coalitions, but rather the personal opinions or views of the volunteer Community Bloggers. The opinions or views expressed in the blog are protected by Section 1 of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Kentucky as non-slanderous free speech; blogs are personal views or opinions and not journalistic news sites.

This is the official blog of Kentucky Equality Federation. Posts contained in this blog may not be the official position of Kentucky Equality Federation, its volunteer officers, directors, management, supported organizations, allies or coalitions, but rather the personal opinions or views of the volunteer Community Bloggers. The opinions or views expressed in the blog are protected by Section 1 of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Kentucky as non-slanderous free speech; blogs are personal views or opinions and not journalistic news sites.

"Many people and groups are victims of discrimination. Some are discriminated against because of their sexual orientation, sexual identity, race, gender, veteran status, or political identification (or lack thereof). Discrimination takes many forms, and it is necessary that the victims of such treatment strive for a better world where all groups, orientations, identities, creeds, and political groups can achieve equality." - Josh Koch, Vice President of Policy and Public Relations.

This is the official blog of Kentucky Equality Federation. Posts contained in this blog may not be the official position of Kentucky Equality Federation, its volunteer officers, directors, management, supported organizations, allies or coalitions, but rather the personal opinions or views of the volunteer Community Bloggers. The opinions or views expressed in the blog are protected by Section 1 of the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Kentucky as non-slanderous free speech; blogs are personal views or opinions and not journalistic news sites.